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An interview by Bill Harnsberger, a Daily Kos front page diarist, with Bruce Wilson of Talk To Action, a "platform for reporting on...the religious right." Some highlights:

The American left, the secular mainstream, and many secular Republicans...have missed, and still do to this day, the disproportionate influence conservative evangelicals exert in American politics and culture.... And in specific, immediate terms they've missed the political impact of Christian Zionism [and] misinterpreted the Tea Party movement.

On Christian Zionism:

[T]here's a Christian Zionist/Likud political symbiosis going back to the late 1970's, and John Hagee and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are close allies......[Pastor John] Hagee is selling Jewish-Americans the proposition that his Christians United For Israel lobby offers benign, non-Book of Revelations (sic) based support for Israel (that's demonstrably a lie). But Hagee's people are...gradually peeling off Jewish support for the Democratic Party. It's bizarre, because Hagee also demonizes Jews to a remarkably vicious degree. [Link.] In his globally distributed books and sermons Hagee claims Hitler was Jewish and promotes the conspiracy theory that European-based Rothschild bankers control the world economy and are scheming to bankrupt America.

On Sarah Palin:

[N]either mainstream media or even progressive media have paid much attention to where she came from, but there's video from a summer 2008 religious conference near Seattle during which Palin's long-time personal prayer leader, Mary Glazier, tells evangelical leadersthat Sarah Palin joined her prayer group in '89, around the time Palin decided to go into politics. Glazier then advocatescleansing "the land" of unbelievers. Palin's clearly in the "prayer warrior" movement - she hangs around with the leaders, uses the lingo, and so on.

On the religious right's quickly changing nature:

The charismatic wing of the movement is where the real action is.... Lou Engle...has become the de-facto prayer leader for the Republican Party. It's targeting entire states for political takeover (Hawaii, for example) and is infiltrating traditionally liberal cities - such as Newark, Orlando, and Baltimore - working with police departments in those cities to "pray down" crime. But what's really going on is the creation of neighborhood watch groups whose church leaders hold a virulently anti-gay, eliminationist ideology. And they're evangelizing the cops, which is what evangelicals do.... "Pray For Newark" [is] organized by city ward. And the leadership is virulently anti-gay and opposes abortion in all cases (including rape & incest), is contemptuous of church-state separation, and is radically pro-big business. In 2010 will that volunteer army work the Newark streets for Democratic candidates? I doubt it.

On the religious right's influence in the US military:

Then there are the chilling inroads the movement has made in evangelizing the US military. Spend some time browsing the extensive media archives from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation...and I guarantee you'll come away with a different sense of conservative evangelical influence in US government.

On the Tea Party movement and the religious right:

I see the Tea Party movement in part as an evangelizing tool that pulls secular libertarians towards the Christian right. Ron Paul was staging 'Tea Party' events across America back in 2007, and Paul's no libertarian. He's good friends with Constitution Party Founder Howard Phillips, a leading Christian Reconstructionist who served briefly as a staffer for Paul's congressional office.

On the growing influence of the religious right within the Republican Party:

[T]he Christian right by 2000 had a strong to moderate level of influence in 44 out of 51 [state Republican parties - link -].... Barry Goldwater was warning...about the Christian right's takeover of the Republican Party trend for over two decades prior to his death, and most media voices are still in denial.

What's wild is that the new Christian right, the charismatic wing, videotapes almost everything it does. The movement chronicles itself, and much of that video is free on the Net. But almost nobody outside of the movement watches it. I can show you a video documentary, from a Ugandan evangelist who backs Uganda's so-called "kill the gays bill," showing his people organizing a partnership between Baltimore churches and the Baltimore police department.... The vision is to purge the Earth of all competing beliefs. It's an expression of Christian supremacy that could hardly be more bigoted or more totalitarian.

Some of the few topics related to the religious right that Bruce does not touch on include its efforts to influence America's courts, its attacks on science education, and its efforts to promote a revisionist history of America's founding. These topics can be explored in part through the sites listed under this site's "Lamp Lighters" blogroll.

[On July 8,] Keith Olbermann's Countdown featured an interview with historian Chris Rodda, who debunked a number of American history lies featured in the first installment of Glenn Beck's new "Glenn Beck University" online course curriculum (see video.) As announced with a flourish, "[Glenn] Beck University is a unique academic experience bringing together experts in the fields of religion, American history and economics." Ah yes, 'experts.'

David Barton's twisting of facts and grotesque manipulation of his audience's ignorance about history are patently immoral. He is intellectually dishonest. Barton's goal is political and his tactics propogandistic; he gives his Christian Nationalism lectures even on US military basis.

Bruce Wilson, the author of the above-cited DailyKos.com diary, rhetorically asks how the falsification of American history by the Religious Right and Fox News play out in the real world. He continues:

Well, to take one notorious example, recently a panel of "experts" appointed by the Texas Board of Education recommended a number of changes to Texas public school social studies curriculum. Changes included renaming the slave trade the "Atlantic Triangular Trade," minimizing the historical role of Thomas Jefferson, who advocated for separation of church and state, and emphasizing the view that the Founding Fathers were motivated by Christian principles. David Barton was on the panel.

Julie Ingersoll has been studying Christian Reconstructionism for years, and of late she has brought crucial insights to RD into how Christian Reconstructionism has influenced current electoral politics, particularly Rand Paul's and Sharron Angle's unlikely Republican Senate primary victories in Kentucky and Nevada.

In an interview with the Rev. Welton Gaddy on State of Belief, Ingersoll explains how Christian Reconstructionist thought, particularly the seminal writing of R.J. Rushdoony, is at the root of the dominionism that animates the contemporary religious right. And one can even see the influence of Reconstructionism on politicians like Ron and Rand Paul, who would not self-identify as Reconstructionists, and who are not even traditionally closely allied with the religious right.

The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America's supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept.

But the Christian nationalist narrative has a fatal flaw: it is based on revisionist history that does not stand up under scrutiny. The bad news is that to true believers, it does not have to stand up to the facts of history to be a powerful and animating part of the once and future Christian nation. Indeed, through a growing cottage industry of Christian revisionist books and lectures now dominating the curricula of home schools and many private Christian academies, Christian nationalism becomes a central feature of the political identity of children growing up in the movement. The contest for control of the narrative of American history is well underway.

[Blog Against Theocracy] is a blogswarm dedicated to the separation of church and state. It is not a blogswarm against religion. Bloggers who believe in religion and those who don't are equally welcome here. What we share is a common commitment to the First Amendment to the Constitution and its guarantee of church-state separation.

That armed militias in the midwest were preparing for an actual battle with agents of the Antichrist is not a surprise. Fear mongering has become epidemic on the political right. Why now? Since the millennium comes at the end of the Tribulations, its approach is constantly expected, and not necessarily tied to any specific date. So warnings that Obama is either the Antichrist or in service to the Satanic plan to build a New World Order are taken seriously by some fundamentalist Christians.

Since I am aware of the reputation that the Templeton Foundation has within the skeptical, atheist, and humanist communities for harboring a right-wing Christian agenda, I would like to note that, in fact, they invited me to select the commentators and edit their essays, and insisted that I include skeptics, atheists, and humanists, which you will see that I did. There was never any hint to me that I should edit the commentaries to come out a certain way to match the alleged agenda; to the contrary, they seemed most eager to give everyone a fair shake … to the tune of over a million dollars spent in a national advertising campaign that included advertorials place in Scientific American, American Scientist, Nature, The New Scientist, The Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Economist, The Financial Times, The New Republic, Prospect, and the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Oh, and Skeptic magazine!

Answers to the question range from “yes” to “no” to “it depends” to “no, but it should.”

Surely it was for this that God created humanity, in order for humanity to create God's chosen nation, The United States of America, so the USA's blessed Department of Defense could create DARPA, so DARPA could give rise to the Internet, so that souls could be saved by this Internet-based service of Rapture-triggered proselytizing e-mails (verily, unsolicited) to be blasted to those assumed by the sender to have been left behind to face the Tribulation all alone.